"I am here to pay respects to this woman's courage. And I believe she had the courage to stand up for human rights; the rights that every human being should have upon this earth and I had to come to pay respects to that. I wish I had that kind of courage."

"I just felt that it was important that I come and pay my last respects for a common lay person, a person that did not have a lot of money and nothing like that but she really changed society, changed history and actually put some of the rights for black people on the map. And I just felt that it was important for me, as well as my family, to come up and just be able to pay some contribution to what she had done to society."

Storyline

Americans on Monday continued to pay tribute to Rosa Parks, the woman whose defiant act on a city bus inspired the modern civil rights movement.

More than 30-thousand filed silently by her coffin in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC.

People had begun gathering outside the Capitol before noon on Sunday and the line of well-wishers and mourners slowly pushed along into the early morning hours on Monday.

A few hours later, Senate majority leader Bill Frist accompanied new Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and his family to the Rotunda, where they paused in silent remembrance.

Several senators joined the procession.

Parks' coffin stood in the centre of a Rotunda that includes a bronze bust of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who led the 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system that helped initiate the modern civil rights movement.

Parks, who died last Monday aged 92, was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an incident that inspired King and helped touch off the civil rights movement.

The former seamstress became the first woman to lie in honour in the Rotunda, sharing the tribute bestowed upon Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and other national leaders.

Later on Monday, Parks' casket was taken down the steps of the East Capitol by a military honour guard of pallbearers, followed by her family,

in preparation for a memorial service.

A vintage Metropolitan bus dressed in black bunting followed the hearse, along with other city buses.

After the memorial service at the Metropolitan AME. Church in Washington, Parks was to lie in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit.